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Automatic voter registration a top priority for some reformers

Automatic voter registration a top priority for some reformers

Allowed by eight states and the District of Columbia, with California and Connecticut soon to join the list:

Idaho

Iowa

Maine

Minnesota

Montana

New Hampshire

Wisconsin

Wyoming

Online registration

Allowed by 15 states:

Arizona

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Hawaii

Indiana

Kansas

Louisiana

Maryland

Nevada

Oregon

South Carolina

Utah

Washington (allows registration on Facebook)

The United States’ leading prosecutor on civil rights issues wants the country to join the majority of other democratic nations when it comes to voting, by making the government – instead of the voter – responsible for registering voters.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, chief of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, is one among a variety of activists and federal officials and lawmakers who say long lines and other problems encountered by voters throughout the nation this fall need to resolved by the federal government if not the states.

The modernization of voter registration is one of several proposals Perez made in a speech last week at a George Washington Law Review symposium attended by election law and voting experts from around the country.

“Under our current system, many voters must follow needlessly complex and varied voter registration rules,” he said. “And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications – most of them handwritten – leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls. That’s exactly what we saw at a number of polling places on Election Day.”

According to a Pew Center on the States study published in February, voter registration databases are riddled with errors. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed as voters, nearly 2.8 million were registered in more than one state, and more than 12 million records had incorrect addresses, the study found.

That study also found that only one in four eligible Americans are registered to vote.

Three elections experts who were panelists at the Washington symposium said Congress should seriously consider the solutions proposed by Perez.

Minimizing the amount of time elections workers spend interacting with voters on Election Day would help, said John Fortier, director of the Democracy Project at the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

States and the federal government already collect a plethora of data about citizens for driver’s licenses, state identification cards, food stamps, housing aid and other services other programs. Governments could create more accurate voter rolls by expanding the databases and then contacting individuals whose information is wrong as well as people who are eligible but not registered, Fortier said.

The databases could also flag ineligible voters, including potential noncitizens that were the target of a controversial voter purge pushed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott this year.

Such an approach could appeal to conservatives like Scott who want to clean up voter rolls as well as Democrats and left-leaning supporters who favor expanding the number of people who are registered.

Too often, lawmakers are “either just about integrity or just about access, and they don’t take the other side’s concerns into play,” Fortier said. “If it’s a compromise, it’s going to have to involve some of both, some ways to reach out to voters who are not on the list and ways to clean up the list.”

Most nations register adults automatically

Some states automatically register people to vote when they get a driver license or state identification card. Florida’s motor-voter law doesn’t automatically register people to vote, but it does ask them if they want to be registered. Streamlining registration ultimately saves money, said Myrna Perez, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which includes registration modernization in its election-law reforms.

A Brennan Center analysis in 2009 found that 75 percent of countries and Canadian provinces — including Germany, Sweden and Argentina — automatically register citizens as they become adults and eligible to vote. Voters in just five of the 20 countries and provinces surveyed, including the U.S., Mexico and the Bahamas, must initiate registration.

Perez, who is not related to the assistant U.S. attorney general, said voter registration issues prompted the vast majority of calls from voters to a nonpartisan election protection hotline this year. Those problems led to logjams, she said.

“It’s people not being on the rolls when they thought they were, or people not being registered anymore when they thought they were,” Perez said. “That causes confusion at the polls. Then they eventually get a provisional ballot.”

Every time a pollworker cannot find a voter on the list, check them off and get them in the booth, that increases lines, she said.

Short of automatic registration, voters should at least be able to register to vote on Election Day, she said.

The eight states that have Election Day registration in place have higher voter participation than the rest of the nation. And five of those states had the highest turnout in the country, Thomas Perez said.

While he didn’t single out Florida by name, many of the observations in his speech reflected problems encountered by voters, including those in Palm Beach County, during early voting and on Election Day. The Justice Department monitored elections in 23 states, including Florida, this year.

The assistant attorney general said the Department of Justice is still reviewing the federal monitors’ observations.

“But there is at least one obvious takeaway, which the country has spent much of the last week discussing: There were widespread breakdowns in election administration in state after state, which forced voters in many states to wait in line for hours at a time – in some states and counties, up to six hours or more,” Perez said.

He also said voters who move should be allowed to cast regular ballots rather than provisional ballots, which have a greater chance of being discarded and take longer to process. Under a new law in Florida passed by lawmakers last year, voters who moved from one county to another without updating their registration in the new county were required to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ballots as the old law permitted.

Perez also called for a crackdown on “deceptive election practices,” such as robocalls received by voters around the country telling them they could vote by telephone or that Election Day had been postponed.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., in September sponsored a “Voter Empowerment” bill that mirrors a Democratic-backed U.S. House proposal that includes a registration modernization component. But prospects of bipartisan support are dim.

“I wish Congress would act in providing more comprehensive reform for elections,” said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas, who also attended the Washington symposium last week. “I’m skeptical that Congress in this political environment could actually accomplish something like that on a broad scale.”

Congress’s ability to force election law changes onto states is limited to Congressional races, but most states that enact the federal requirements also apply them to other races, Douglas said.

Some precendent for action

The federal government has imposed voting requirements in the past. The 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibited states from discriminating against minorities or non-English-speaking voters. In 1993, Congress passed the “Motor Voter Act,” which required states to allow voters to register to vote when they apply for driver licenses or identification cards.

In the aftermath of the protracted presidential recount in 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. In response to complaints in Florida and elsewhere that people, especially former felons, had been erroneously purged from the voter rolls, the law required voters to be able to cast provisional ballots in certain circumstances. And to eliminate a reprisal of Palm Beach County’s hanging chads, the law did away with punch card and lever machines.

The law also created the federal “Elections Assistance Commission,” which has never got off the ground. Last week, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., issued a news release calling on Republicans to nominate people to their two seats on the commission. She also called on Congress to confirm appointees to the commission.

But the commission, a bipartisan panel appointed by House and Senate leaders and the president, will do little to solve election problems, as it has oversight of state elections but little enforcement power, said Douglas, who favors doing away with Election Day and replacing it with “Election Week.”

Others blame local officials for problems such as not having enough ballots or voting equipment. State and local elections officials should be required to have a thought-out plan that includes a forecast of how many voters will turn up on election day or during early voting and a limited number of days for early voting, Fortier said.

“The two biggest things, trying to manage the voter flow and improving our registration systems, would handle most of the problems,” he said.